The face of others: Triadic and dyadic interactions in Korea and the United States

Abstract

The concept of group face has been used to explain facework that relates to members of in-groups. Hahn and Hatfield (2011) looked at situations in which a family member of a Speaker commits a possible offense towards a Hearer. They tested the prediction that collectivist Koreans would apologize for the family member at a greater rate than individualist Americans who would be focused upon individual face not group face. This prediction was not confirmed as the chance of an apology for the two groups was not significantly different among the university students participating. Interpreting speaker responses in such triadic interactions, however, was difficult because there was no comparison point to classic dyadic interactions. Without this comparison the facework performed could be unrelated to group face. The current paper creates this comparison point by adapting the methods of Hahn and Hatfield for dyadic interaction. A Discourse Completion Task was given to 80 speakers. There was no significant difference in apology rates between the two countries in either the triadic or dyadic studies, plus a complex interaction of each factor with Gender. The results argue for the significance of face management of individuals and groups not in immediate interaction, which has implications for the distinction of face and identity.

Journal of Politeness Research: Introduction

“…In the opening editorial of their first co-edited journal issue, they note that the first issue of the first volume of the Journal of Politeness Research featured research "discussing and (re)introducing issues and positions which were to presage many of the debates that we see in current issues of the journal" (Bousfield and Grainger 2010: 162 Grainger et al 2015), rapport management , politeness as identity work (Garcés-Conejos Blitvich et al 2013;Georgakopoulou 2013), politeness as facework (Al-Adaileh 2011;Kádár and Roe 2012;Hatfield and Hahn 2014), the interrelations between identity and face (Bucholtz and Hall 2013;Joseph 2013;Miller 2013) and fundamental epistemological questions such as the role of the analyst (Haugh 2012;Kádár and Mills 2013). An example is the special issue guestedited by Garcés-Conejos Blitvich (2013) on identity and facework.…”

“…These latter two special issues have arisen out of the need to expanding politeness research to other geographical areas (also see Brown 2010Brown , 2013Kádár and Mills 2013;Hatfield and Hahn 2014;Peterson and Vaattovaara 2014) and to further investigating politeness in non-verbal forms, such as the complex relationship between prosody and politeness. As Hidalgo Navarro (2014: 1) notes, the phonic aspect of (im)politeness is still emerging.…”

An intercultural theory of international relations: how self-worth underlies politics among nations

“…Although face cultures are not exclusive to East Asia (Nwoye 1992), the most clear-cut cases are China (Gries 1999(Gries , 2004He and Zhang 2011;Kádár, Haugh, and Chang 2013) and Korea (Hahn and Hatfield 2011;Hatfield and Hahn 2014). Another interesting case in point, although somewhat less studied, is Japan (Morisaki and Gudykunst 1994).…”

A discursive approach to the analysis of politeness data

“…Perhaps most importantly, it seems very difficult to teach it to students. Indeed, we have noticed a "return to Brown and Levinson", both in terms of the numbers of PhD theses submitted recently (e.g., Al-Adaileh 2007;Shih 2007;Hsieh 2009), and in terms of journal articles and other publication outputs which draw explicitly on Brown and Levinson's model (e.g., Peterson and Vaattovaara 2014;Schlund 2014;Bouchara 2015;Hatfield and Hahn 2014), albeit seemingly modified by a (discursive) critical approach. Although new research outputs that make use of adapted versions of Brown and Levinson's model do make important contributions to the field of politeness research, too, in this article we would like to address some of the critiques of discursive approaches to politeness, and establish discursive approaches more markedly as an alternative starting point for the analysis of politeness.…”